Having been in the Search Engine Optimization business for well over 10 years, it’s a shame that we are at a point when Google’s organic search team makes a change to their algorithm, decides on a whim that a legitimate marketing technique is unethical, or makes an official announcement that SSL is now a ranking factor. It’s sad that we’re at a point that when Google says, “Jump!” we say “How High?” [Read more…]
Due to Google’s recent official announcement that an https site is a search engine ranking factor, I’ve decided to move my site, BillHartzer.com, to https from http. Just to see if I can get a better rankings for the pages on my website. Currently, I do not accept any sort of payment for the content that I write here on my site, so that’s not the reason I’m moving the site from http to https.
Trust is the biggest factor in my decision to change from http to https, and that’s one major way you can get a higher visibility in web search. My web host, HostDime, offers secure certificates at a very reasonable rate, which is $30 per year for a basic certificate. It’s good for www and non-www. [Read more…]
I am not sure if this is something that has been done on purpose or not, but Google has removed the Google Authorship stats that were previously available in Google Webmaster Tools.
The page, which was previously located here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/labs-author-stats-1 is now showing a 404 error:
There’s a website (domain name) that shows up as a referral in your Google Analytics. Semalt.com bills itself as “Semalt is a professional webmaster analytics tool that opens the door to new opportunities for the market monitoring, yours and your competitors’ positions tracking and comprehensible analytics business information.” Okay, fine. But to be honest with you, most likely you do NOT want any traffic from Semalt.com. In fact, it’s not real visitors, it’s just a “bot” that is making it look like there are visitors from their domain name to your website. Real visitors are generally not coming from a website called Semalt.com to your website. So, to accurately see your referral and website visitor traffic in Google Analytics, I recommend removing this or “excluding” semalt.com in your Google Analytics tracking. Here’s how to set up a filter in Google Analytics to filter out this domain name (or any other domain name) in your Google Analytics.
First, you need to log into Google Analytics. Then, click on the “Admin” tab at the top, as shown below.
Google just dropped their real name policy. So, starting now, this means that there are no restrictions on names you can use when signing up for services such as Google Plus and YouTube. As you might recall, Google+ had revised their real name policy back in 2012, saying that only .1 percent of users have submitted name appeals, and the majority (60%) of these users want to simply add nicknames. But now, they’ve changed all that. You can use any name you want.
Here’s part of the post and statement from Google that was just made regarding real names: [Read more…]
I just got ahold of the latest copy of Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines, with a date of March 2014. It’s an interesting read, all 160 pages of this document. There are a lot of new phrases and concepts that are included in this latest version, but honestly there’s are really not many new surprises. But, if you’re in the online marketing business, are an SEO, or own a website, then you really should take a look at the latest guidelines, if just to make sure that your website or your client’s website(s) are compliant with Google’s latest Quality Rater guidelines. There may be some things that you can improve, I’ve found a few things that I’m going to pay attention to from now on when I perform complex SEO Audits for clients. [Read more…]
